


Practical Applications of Game Theory

by weakinteraction



Category: Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Bondage, Fake Marriage, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 17:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4675925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the Millennium Falcon after escaping from Bespin, Lando reflects on his relationship with Han.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Practical Applications of Game Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moontyger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moontyger/gifts).



Lando checked the navicomputer again. After a few short zig-zag hyperspace hops to throw any pursuers off the tail, the Falcon was on course, speeding away from Bespin, away from the galaxy entirely, away from the life he had built over the past few years.

Lando allowed himself a moment to mourn the passing of that phase of his life, but only a moment; it was over now and he had always been good at moving on. Cloud City had been evacuated successfully, and hopefully the small detachment Darth Vader had brought with him was more focused on its fruitless pursuit of them than harrying the refugees.

He looked out of the window at the ethereal blue nothingness. The vagaries of hyperspace travel meant that it wasn't as long a trip to the Rebels' rendezvous point, far out in the void, as it could sometimes be to a nearby system, but two days would be plenty long enough to spend with nowhere to go outside the confines of the ship. When the Falcon had been his ship, he'd usually only taken one other person with him. It felt very crowded with four sentients and two droids on board, even before you factored in that the others all held him responsible for what had happened to Han.

He held himself responsible too. The ship would have felt oppressively cramped even if he had simply been alone on board, with only his guilt for company.

Chewbacca sat in the co-pilot's seat in silence; it was obvious that he was deeply affected by what had happened. He had sworn a life debt to Han, and yet at the crucial moment had been unable to protect him. Lando felt a kinship with him: he had a debt to pay to Han too, now, and somehow he felt that the Wookiee understood this. Along with their pre-existing acquaintance, this meant that Chewie was the member of the little band on board the ship who Lando was least concerned about being accepted by. It was the others he needed to work on. They were heroes of the Rebellion, and he could tell that they viewed him as an amoral chancer -- had done even before he had allowed the Empire to capture them.

The Han they seemed to know -- the Han they missed, the Han they had lost and blamed him for the loss of -- wasn't quite the same Han that Lando had known. And if Han could convince them there was more than one side to him, then Lando could do the same. But he wasn't going to manage it sat up here staring at the navicomputer as the ship steadily ate up the thousands of parsecs to their destination.

"I'm going to head back," Lando said. "You'll be all right up here on your own?"

Chewbacca gave a low growl that Lando decided to take as assent. Lando patted him awkwardly on the shoulder as he left.

In the recreation area, Leia was finishing applying bacta to the stump of Luke's arm. They were talking quietly, seriously, but stopped completely when they heard his footsteps. Leia finished what she was doing, then rose imperiously and stalked off without sparing him a second glance.

Lando couldn't blame her. The immediate crisis over, any positive feelings she might have started to develop towards him, from shared peril and shared purpose in rescuing Luke, had been overwhelmed by her memory of what had happened to Han. Lando thought back to what they had said to each other in the carbonite chamber. He had never said the word "love" to Han; their relationship was both simpler and more complicated than that. But he imagined that if he had, he'd have received a similar flippant response to the one Han had given the princess.

Luke stayed however, and when Lando moved to sit down on the opposite side of the dejarik board he didn't show any outward sign of displeasure. It was a start.

Neither of them spoke for some time. Lando didn't know what Luke had been discussing with Leia, but he knew it wasn't something Luke would be ready to share with him. At least not yet.

"Han trusted you," Luke said finally.

A dozen different answers died in Lando's mouth before he spoke: joking deflections, angry denials, baseless accusations flung back at Luke. Something in the Jedi's eyes showed him it would be a waste of time. "Do you know what trust is?" he asked eventually, but didn't give Luke time to answer before continuing. "Have you heard the one about the two prisoners? They're accused of committing a crime together, and they're being interrogated separately."

"We had that one even on Tatooine," Luke said. "It must go back thousands of years." Luke rattled through the explanation in a bored tone. "They're both going to get a one year sentence if they stay quiet, based on the evidence the authorities have. But if one of them talks, they'll go free and the other gets five years. If they both talk, they'll both get two years."

"The version I know has bigger numbers," Lando said. "But that's just details. What's your answer? What would you do?"

There was the tiniest hint of a wry smile on Luke's face. "I always used to say that I would hope that I wouldn't get myself into a situation like that in the first place."

"And now? Now that you're one of the leaders of the Rebellion, top of the Empire's most wanted list?"

"I would never betray a member of the Alliance. And I would trust any of them not to betray me."

Lando looked Luke straight in the eye. "Then what if it was me?"

Silence fell between them again.

In the end, it was Lando who broke it. If Luke wouldn't give him something to argue against, he would take both sides. "People usually say: If I don't say anything, I might get a five year sentence or zero. But if I do, I might get one or two. So I should talk. On average my sentence will be shorter." Luke's lips twitched, as though he was about to say something, but thought better of it. Lando even wondered if Luke saw the same flaw he did: that it assumed an even chance of your compatriot staying silent or cracking under the pressure. Lando always liked to know the odds better than that.

"Let me tell you what trust is," Lando said when Luke still said nothing. "There's another version of the story. What if the prisoners know for sure that the exact same thing's going to happen to them again, somewhere down the line? Clearly they're terrible recidivist rogues, incapable of turning over a new leaf, but let's imagine. Should they change how they behave?"

Luke waited for a moment before replying. "OK, I'll play along. Yes, they should. If one betrays the other, then next time, the other will betray them first to avoid getting the five year sentence. So they'll end up with a longer sentence than if they stayed silent."

"That's what trust is," Lando said. "Predicting someone's future behaviour based on what they've done in the past."

"Then it sounds to me more like you're saying that trust is nothing more than not having been betrayed yet."

"What I'm saying is that Han and I have been in that sort of situation more than once."

"Really?"

Lando smiled. "It's all just a matter of having your stories straight."

* * *

"So how did you two meet?"

"Honey, let me tell the story," Han said, putting a hand on Lando's arm. "He always tells it wrong," he added, turning to the proctor in front of them.

Having been initially reluctant, Han was now enjoying the facade of being honeymooners a little too much for Lando's liking. This wasn't just another stallholder in the bazaar around the temple entrance, whose flinty eyes might sparkle at Han's easygoing manner; it was eight feet of rock-man in an intimidating uniform, who had asked the question in a far from friendly manner. As Han expanded on their agreed cover story at length, Lando was already evaluating the probabilities: was this just natural suspicion, or had the authorities received a tip off?

He got his answer soon enough when, at the conclusion of Han's story, they were marched off to the Proctorate and thrown into separate cells.

"Don't worry, sweetheart!" Han shouted as he was bundled off down the corridor. "I'm sure they'll sort out this misunderstanding soon enough and we can get back to our vacation."

Lando rolled his eyes and sat down on the small but functional bed provided in the cell to wait.

It was supposed to be a simple enough assignment. Sapphorta was a backwards planet; only a few systems Rimward from Y'Toub, but surrounded in hyperspace in several directions by null zones and patches of turbulence; since there were only a few safe approaches, it lay off the main trade routes. The native sentients were silicate forms, and worshipped crystals which they insisted had special powers. Lando's employer -- whoever it might be; everything had been through an intermediary -- wanted one of these crystals swapped for a less valuable dummy. He'd been told to bring a partner, and had asked the young pilot he'd met a few days earlier to come along. He was going to need someone to fly the ship anyway.

It was only when they were underway that the details of their assignment had decrypted themselves in their datapads; whoever they were working for, they were folding themselves up in layer after layer of secrecy. The crystal they were to ... acquire, according to the local superstitions, had particular responsibility for love and lust. It was housed in a temple on a high plateau, and -- apart from the priest caste who tended it, who were ritually married to the crystal itself -- only those seeking a blessing on a recent union were permitted to enter its presence.

Han had reached that part of the datapad before Lando. "We have to be newlyweds!" Lando had laughed awkwardly, but Han had seemed somewhat affronted as well as amused.

Left in the cell for several hours, Lando had plenty of time to wonder how Han really felt. There'd been a spark of attraction between them as soon as they'd met, but he couldn't tell if Han wanted to pursue it. Right now, he couldn't be sure whether Han even cared enough for Lando not to just turn him in and high tail it out of there.

Eventually, the stomping stony footsteps of the proctors returned, along with Han's protesting voice, and it was Lando's turn to be hauled out of his cell to the interrogation room.

The proctor who quizzed him was the same one who had arrested them in the first place, and the questions were repetitive and dull, focused on minutiae, clearly designed to catch him out in an inconsistency with Han. Lando stuck to the back story they'd been given, and spent most of the journey to the planet rehearsing, throughout the whole process, beginning to wonder whether Han's "you always tell it wrong" might not have been a masterstroke of strategy after all.

"Very well," the proctor said, a few mind-numbing hours later. "Your story matches your husband's." He looked at Lando in a way that definitely made Lando wonder how well the Sapphortans could read human expressions. "Perhaps a little too well. But we have no grounds to hold you; you may proceed with your pilgrimage." He made an expression that might have been a grimace. "Please accept the apologies of the Guild of Temple Proctors for any inconvenience."

Back on the Falcon, once they'd secured the crystal in one of the ship's many hidden compartments and jumped to hyperspace, they had gone to their bunks without speaking a word. But hours later, Lando had been woken from fevered dreams by a warm presence sliding in next to him.

Han's breath was soft on his ear and Lando felt a shiver of anticipation run through his body. And then Han said, "Y'know, we really should consummate this marriage of ours."

* * *

Lando left out many of the details in what he told Luke, but the story held his interest. "I wonder, that crystal ..." he began, but then said, "So you and Han worked together like that often?"

"Often enough."

"And so you grew to trust each other ... by your definition of trust."

"It's just like with games," Lando said, gesturing at the dejarik board between himself and Luke. "If you don't play fair, people won't want to play with you again." As he said it, Lando realised suddenly why everything had gone wrong on Cloud City: he had assumed Darth Vader was just another player, albeit a powerful one, in the games of money, power and influence that criss-crossed the galaxy. But Vader had a very different agenda, one that Lando couldn't understand, and if he succeeded in it all the games would be over for everyone else, forever.

Luke considered for a moment. "Would you like to play?" he asked.

Lando looked more closely at the dejarik board; it had never been his game. "Sure, why not?"

The most difficult thing for Luke in achieving victory seemed to be playing one-handed, but Lando agreed to a rematch anyway. If Luke wanted to play, then Lando would play. He began to wonder if Luke was testing what he'd said, seeing if he would play fair in a repeat match.

"You're bringing your M'onnok out too early. You should leave it in reserve until later in the game," Luke offered after he had won again.

"Back home, seeing a M'onnok was supposed to bring you luck," Lando said. "And I figured I needed all the help I could get."

"Dejarik isn't really a game of chance."

Lando made a show of looking around. "Well, there must be a sabacc deck around here somewhere ..."

Luke laughed, and Lando was glad to hear how unaffected it seemed. "Is that really how Han got the ship from you?"

So Lando told Luke the story; he was good at telling this story, had told it a few hundred times, and embellished it a little with each telling. On this occasion, however, he thought it best not to include the funniest, though also least true, part where he insinuated that Han must have been using a skifter. By the time he got to the end of the tale, Luke's laughter filled the ship.

* * *

Lando decided not to tell Luke about all the other times he and Han had played sabacc, one-on-one.

Everywhere else in the galaxy, they called it "Nar Shaddaa rules", but on Nar Shaddaa itself, it was "Corellian sector rules". Han always used to jokingly object to the stereotyping of his people, but it didn't stop him playing. They added a twist of their own: whoever was still clothed at the end of the game was "in charge" for the rest of the evening. Which was how Lando knew that Han didn't cheat at sabacc: they both ended up "in charge" equally often.

Lando's most vivid single memory was of a time when Han had lost only very narrowly. They'd both been down to their underwear as the final hand began. Lando was acutely conscious of his hardness, how visible his arousal would be to Han ... and how visibly aroused Han was in turn.

Lando kept his face unreadable as another randomisation pulse hit, but inwardly he was grinning as he neutralised his cards one by one. A score of -21 wasn't a guaranteed win, but the odds were in his favour. Han raised an eyebrow, but waited for a further randomisation pulse before turning over his cards. They came to 20. Lando displayed his own hand.

"Well, it would be a win at pazaak," Han said as he stood and removed his briefs.

"No one's played pazaak seriously for centuries," Lando said. "Now get over here."

Lando stood too as Han came over to him. He gripped Han's hard cock and pumped it once, twice, then stopped. "You like that?" Han nodded. Lando continued and the desire to make Han come there and then, to feel his cock pulse in his hand and make Han realise than that pleasure was entirely in his gift, nearly overwhelmed him. But instead he squeezed Han firmly at the top of his shaft. Han squirmed and Lando said, "Only when I say." Han nodded again, and this time his eyes stayed cast downwards as his head bobbed back up and Lando knew that he was his, for the moment at least.

"Down on your knees," Lando said, and Han obeyed instantly. He went the short distance to the supply compartment that they had stocked over time with various equipment and returned with a Zygerrian slave collar. He closed it around Han's neck and without being told Han brought his hands up to be secured in the cuffs attached on either side by rigid rods. Lando glanced down and smirked at the sight of Han's cock twitching in excitement.

He removed his underwear so that he was just as naked as Han, his member thrusting out as he did so. Han parted his lips involuntarily at the sight and Lando took the opportunity to thrust into his mouth. Grabbing hold of Han's hair with both hands, he forced Han's mouth down his shaft, then pulled Han's head back until only the tip of his cock was between his lips; then he thrust inside his mouth and began to fuck it wildly. Han clamped his lips firmly around him, and tried to use his tongue on the base of Lando's shaft, but Lando was going so fast that it made little difference.

All too soon, Lando exploded, pulses of come spurting into Han's throat. He groaned and looked down with a wolfish grin at Han, who seemed to feel pleased with himself. "You're not done yet," Lando said. "Get me hard again." He pulled Han's head down once more and then curled his fingers into his hair.

Lando had kept Han on the brink all night, even as he came himself three or four more times, finally stroking him to orgasm -- it had taken only the merest feather-light touch, really -- only as the sounds of the day cycle began around them in the small apartment in the docks of the Smuggler's Moon. But on other nights, Han had been the one calling the shots, and Lando remembered too how it had felt to spend hours worshipping the firm lines of his toned physique. Lando had had other lovers -- before, during and since his time with Han -- but never found someone whose skin and aroma he could lose himself in so completely, nor someone who, when the boot was on the other foot, was so eager and yet so defiant at the same time.

* * *

Lando lay in the bunk that had been his, and then had become Han's, and which, more often than not on the longer transits through hyperspace, they had shared. Han had willingly wagered himself on those many nights when they had played sabacc, but now Lando had lost him without even realising he had been on the table in the deal he had made with Vader.

The bitter regrets of everything that had just happened vied with the sweet memories of the more distant past to keep him awake. After hours of guiltily resisting the idea, he tried to masturbate, partly to relieve the arousal from all the memories that had been stirred up by seeing Han again, partly in hope that the sheer physical release might help him sleep. But the mental image of Han tied up to be fucked blurred into how Lando had last seen him, frozen inside the carbonite. Lando resigned himself to a sleepless night resisting the collapse of the gravity well of his own dark thoughts into a singularity of self-loathing.

Perhaps, Lando thought, for those strong in the Force, like Luke -- or Darth Vader -- everything played out like a game of dejarik. You made your move and waited for your opponent to respond, but you already had responses planned to anything they might do, and you knew that they did too. Everything was predictable, determinable. But for the mere mortals like Lando, and Han, life was much closer to a game of sabacc. And in the end gambling was an art, not a science. Compute the odds, sure, but when the great randomiser field of life scrambled your cards before you'd had time to get them into the neutral field, you played the hand in front of you. Lando had done it before, many times, and now he would do it once more.

Even if it meant that this time he had to become a hero.


End file.
